A View of ye Long Room at Hampstead from the Heath. | Vue de la Chambre longue à Hampstead du Côté de la Colline.
In the vicinity of the Great Room, stood Sion Chapel,[188] where couples on presenting a license and the sum of five shillings could be married at any time. A clergyman was always in attendance, and if the newly married would take their wedding dinner in the garden of the tavern nothing beyond the license was required. In 1716 the chapel was referred to as a “private and pleasure place” where many persons of the best fashion were married. It may be suspected, however, that the marriages were often, like those at the Fleet and Mayfair, irregular, and that the license was occasionally dispensed with.
During the first ten or twenty years of the eighteenth century, Hampstead Wells presented a gay and varied scene. When tired of the music and dancing in the Great Room, the visitor could adjourn to the bowling green, or to the raffling shops, where the cards were flying and the dice rattling, while fine gentlemen lost their money with “ease and negligence.” There was the promenade in Well Walk beneath the avenue of limes, or a stroll might be taken on the breezy Heath. Court ladies were there “all air and no dress”; city ladies all dress and no air, and country dames with “broad brown faces like a Stepney bun.” Citizens like Mr. Deputy Driver in the comedy[189] came down from town, perhaps to find their ladies coquetting with a beau, or retired to picquet with some brisk young Templar. “This Hampstead’s a charming place,” exclaims Arabella the citizen’s wife: “To dance all night at the Wells; be treated at Mother Huff’s,[190] have presents made one at the raffling shops, and then take a walk in Cane Wood with a man of wit that’s not over rude.”
With this gay and fashionable throng there mingled company of a lower class, such as the Fleet Street sempstresses who danced minuets “in their furbeloe scarfs” and ill-fitting clothes. By about 1724 the more rakish and disreputable element had become predominant.[191] Bad characters came from London in “vampt up old cloaths to catch the apprentices.” Lord Lovemore might still court his “mimic charmer”[192] there, but modest people did not care to join the company on the walks. The playing and dicing were kept up as formerly, but gentlemen no longer lost with ease and negligence, and one sharper tried to cheat another. In 1733 the Great Room was converted into an Episcopal Chapel and was used for church services until 1849. In 1869 the West Middlesex Volunteers occupied the building. About 1880 it was demolished, and to-day a modern red brick house in Well Walk (erected in 1892), and the entrance to Gainsborough Gardens occupy the site. A tablet on the house testifies that the “Old pump room” (i.e. Great Room) once stood on the spot.
In 1734 Dr. John Soame published a pamphlet in which he extolled with somewhat suspicious optimism the virtues of the neglected spring, recommending the water for cutaneous affections and nervous disorders. According to Soame, the spring[193] then threw off water at the rate of five gallons in four minutes, and could be made to throw a stream upwards to a height of at least twelve feet. “The Beautys of Hampstead,” a song of this period, extols the “Chrystal bub’ling Well,”[194] but the water-drinking does not appear again to have become the vogue, though as a place of amusement the Wells still enjoyed some degree of popularity. Another assembly-house, known as the Long Room, took the place of the old Great Room. This was a substantial red brick building of one storey. The ground floor consisted of an entire room with two small ante-rooms, one on either side of the entrance, used for tea-parties and card-playing. The floor above was divided up into rooms, where a cosy supper or a game of cards might be enjoyed. The house (probably built, in part, in the seventeenth century) still exists, and is to be found on the opposite side to the old Great Room, about a hundred yards further down Well Walk, going from the Heath. It is now a private residence called Weatherall House. It was in the Long Room that the Hampstead Balls took place of the kind described by Frances Burney. Here Evelina[195] was worried by Beau Smith, and refused the offers of “inelegant and low-bred” partners, who “begged the favour of hopping a dance” with her. Samuel Rogers (Table Talk) says that in his youth (circ. 1783) the Hampstead Assemblies were frequented by “a great deal of good company,” and that he himself danced four or five minuets there in one evening.
In 1802 a surgeon named John Bliss published a treatise, in which, without success, he endeavoured once more to awaken an interest in the medicinal properties of the Well. Mr. Keates, consulting chemist to the Metropolitan Board of Works, in recent times stated that it was a distinctly chalybeate water containing sufficient iron to render it capable of producing marked therapeutic effects. It was extremely pure, and in general character, though with a larger proportion of iron, resembled that of Tunbridge Wells.[196]
[Dodsley’s London (1761); Ambulator, 1774; Kearsley’s Strangers’ Guide (1793?); Walford, v. 467, ff.; Thorne’s Environs of London (1876), 281; Sir Gilbert Scott’s Proposed Destruction of the Well Walk (Hampstead, 1879), with plan of Well Walk; Park’s Hampstead; Baines’s Hampstead.]
VIEWS.
1. The Pump-room, Well Walk (i.e. Great Room), since, the Episcopal Chapel, in Baines’s Hampstead, from a drawing by Blanche Cowper Baines, after E. H. Dixon.
2. The old Well Walk, Hampstead, about 1750 (Walford, v. 463).